ISSUE 1.44

Modern Horrors

This article covers the incredible, diasporic spread of "creepypasta", copied and mutated stories designed to do nothing more than invoke Lovecraftian dread in you. Interesting musings on the genesis of creepypasta from lost-suppressed-horror-TV shows to forum-crowdsourced-urban legends, and how the author can judge their success by the obliteration of attribution as the work morphs and spreads like a dread virus.

The tl;ds (too scary; didn't read): it'd instantly nuke tons of ocean life and send massive amounts of radiation into our ocean. (And going off last week's news about plastic being in our salts, it will probably irradiate the things we eat from the ocean to a large extent.) And in case you don't know why this is relevant now, it's because Trump threatened to destroy the entire country of North Korea so North Korea is like well we'll just bomb the entire ocean as a show of force. Fun times!

Stolen tweets I can't remember: "who wants to tell them?" They were put into isolation in order to understand the psychological impacts of long-term space flight. Some pretty interesting stuff like how "all of their communications with the outside world were subjected to a 20-minute delay — the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to Earth" and devices that "could sense if people were avoiding one another, or if they were 'toe-to-toe'". They also had virtual reality devices to help with stress, allowing them to briefly go on vacation.

I find this interesting in that it's the first example I've seen of a meme creator actually asserting their creative copyright on characters or images that they created. I remember the artist who created the lolwut pear, ursulav, being frustrated about her complete lack of attribution despite its widespread use at one point on the internet. Luckily it seems like Pepe Papa Matt Furie has the resources and the fury (sorry) to actually go after people appropriating his work.

Want to read about a bunch of murderers who used the insanity plea, citing the belief that they were in the Matrix? Well, gee, do I have the article for you! It also covers some other types of insanity pleas and mostly covers its implications within the legal system. Warning: pretty gruesome descriptions within.

A beautiful longread on the steady progression from Zuck's knockoff hotornot for Harvard up to a world where our opinions, news, and information intake is gradually adjusted and by Facebook's algorithms. Am I leaving a tab open in Facebook to check for notifications, likes, and hot takes from my friends and only my friends? Yes.

Way's Notes

Hi there!

Do you think gnats and flies feel existential dread, fleeing around my massive, swinging hands as I try to end their lives? If you think about it, simple survival as an extremely tiny flying insect must include a lot of fear. Can gnats feel fear or dread or abject horror? Am I the monster, come to destroy them in the prime of their short lives, full of an irritation embodied by an emotionally capable being that must seem like the most terrifying, awful force of fury? Am I Gnat Cthulu? I very well may be.

When I was young, I was watering the plants outside and found a grasshopper. I started to drown it, as it struggled in the river I created. But I had the realization that it too, was life, trying to get along, just like I was. And I've had more respect for life ever since then. Except for gnats and cockroaches. Fuck gnats and cockroaches.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday and I told her about something I was realizing lately: the difference between self-esteem and self-respect. Self-esteem is pride, confidence, joy from the work you've done and from your being essentially good. Yet self-respect is realizing your own essential worthiness as a human being. Respecting what you spend your time thinking about, what you put in your body, who you surround yourself with, what you do with your time. Self-esteem vanishes on a bad day, but self-respect holds you steady. I hadn't realized that for the longest time I've been chasing self-esteem when what I really needed was self-respect. To be able to look at myself and say, "Well you're in a shit spot, but you're OK and you're going to take care of yourself--because you respect yourself." Implied here, of course, is self love. And this is an incredibly difficult lesson to remember and learn. Anyways, this is decidedly not a particularly horrifying subject, but hey, we've implicitly agreed that this newsletter is really a vague piecemeal autobiography delivery mechanism, haven't we? Maybe the true horror is confronting the self. Oh, yeah... that's scary. *shiver*

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